I get rather regular hysteria from her in my inbox, which I've pretty much ignored - there's enough mountains to climb without sweating molehills along the way. But today, I clicked open yet another urgent call to action entitled HUGE SCANDAL BREWING, and discovered that she's frothing at the mouth over Jonathan Gruber.
Give me a fucking break.
I'm not even going to dignify her bullshit with a link. I'm sure you can find it plastered all over FDL. She's screeching about Gruber being "paid $780,000 by the Obama administration." I used to think Jane was a smart woman, but if she can't tell the difference between a fucking research grant and money paid direct by the White House, she's just as stupid as the Cons I regularly beat on this blog.
Paul Krugman ably disposed of this supposed scandal, and has an additional bit of advice Jane should really take to heart:
There's plenty of real scandal to be going on with, Jane. Leave the fake scandals to the Cons. Maybe then, I'll feel inclined to open your emails, and possibly even sign the occasional petition. It's possible I'll even start visiting FDL again, once some of the sound and fury signifying absolutely fucking nothing has subsided.What the folks at Firedoglake should ask themselves is this: do you really want to become just like the right-wingers with their endless supply of fake scandals?
The folks at FDL used to do excellent work. I hope they manage to do it again. But based on all the manufactured outrage that's spilled from there over the last several months, I'll die of asphyxiation if I hold my breath.
Krugman missed the point entirely, not to mention sliming Marcy Wheeler in the process. He did nothing besides point out the obvious, while ignoring the even more obvious fact that Gruber did not reveal the fact of his employment by HHS while he was supporting the viewpoint of the Administration that was able to give or withhold future work from him.
ReplyDeleteNearly every professional organization has ethical guidelines that handle this sort of situation, and I'm not aware of any that say "cover up that relationship". Krugman was wrong, and to top it off, he deliberately insulted someone who wasn't.
I'm also sorry I didn't write a rebuttal of that Jonathon Cohn piece when it came out. The idiot doesn't even realize he was making the case for the bill's opponents. This is a prime example of what I was writing about here. This meathead expects that people will pay out their last dime rather for insurance that won't do them any good, because it covers too little, and because there is no authority in the Senate bill (the one Cohn is referring to) to enforce any of the regulations.
ReplyDeleteNot one of those wonderfully dispositive essays you're referring to even addresses the issue that any drooling idiot would know to look at first, which is how the government is going to enforce regulations on an industry that has shown no interest in being regulated and has hundreds of millions of dollars that it will use to get its way with both Congress and the White House.
People at FDL have asked that question, particularly Jon Walker. You need to pay more attention to what they write, I think, and less to the bought-off fools who wrote the nonsense you're citing.
Oh, and by the way, Krugman stated in that article where he "slyly disposed" of FDL that he assumed that wages would rise if health care costs fell. He was not enough of an economist to check whether that was true, however. This guy was, and guess what? There's no evidence that it would.
ReplyDelete"Disposing" someone's argument takes more than just having a degree and some awards, and then making a snotty comment or two. It takes actually looking into the situation. Krugman was just blowing smoke, and you believed him without checking.